Robot Aircraft: That’s not big enough department

As a dedicated and perennial pedestrian, I’m not aching for the advent of flying cars. And frankly, I’m more than a little frightened at the prospect of autonomous vehicles of any kind running free in my neighborhood.

So, Volocopter’s demonstration of an autonomous decaoctocopter (18 rotors!) is worrying indeed. : – )

“We bring urban air mobility to your life”  — whether I want it or not!

With a 200kg payload, this possibly could be a flying taxi (they do have a passenger version), but they are advertising it for freight delivery.  When you need 100 pizzas delivered right now!

It’s not so much the 18 chop-off-your-head rotors so much as the alleged autonomy that really worries me.  I mean, 18 rotors is good, I like redundancy. You can probably land safely even if you lose a rotor or two. And it’s electric, so that’s good.  Clean and quiet.

But I have to wonder just how something this big (certainly 5 meters across?) navigates through an urban hardscape on its own.  With weather, bird strikes, smoke and fires. Who knows what idiocy Carbon-based units come up with. If it is deployed in the US, it’s going to have to weather gunfire.

And, of course, if there is one then soon there will be dozens and hundreds.  Their boast that this vehicle can “[s]kip traffic jams and detours” to give you predictable delivery will be hard to sustain when there is more than one in the air at the same time.  Soon enough there will need to be air lanes and traffic control and all that.

It sounds like the first operations will be in Singapore, so we’ll see how it works out there.

Robot Wednesday